Those who have the patience and receptivity required will be impressed and moved by this one-of-a-kind creation.
An account of a genocide written by a fictional character named Gittl, translated by a fictional character named Charles into a wildly Yiddishized and jabberwocked version of English.
The premise of Rothman-Zecher's experimental second novel is that there was a town called Zatelsk where all but two people were taken into the woods and shot in a single afternoon. One of the survivors was a boy named Leyb, the other a girl named Gittl who lost a large family of siblings. Both wind up in 1930s Philadelphia, where Leyb meets an urbane Black man named Charles in a gay bar. Charles introduces young Leyb to the ways of the world and becomes close to Gittl as well. Included in the story are accounts of meetings between Charles and Gittl to discuss the particulars of his translation of her “mayseh,” such as what words should be capitalized, and whether "Kuren Smerti" (list of the dead) can be "oversat" (an anglification of iberzetzen, Yiddish for translated) or should be left in the original Ukrainian. There's also quite a bit of passionate sex, communism, and a long section recording Gittl's burial prayers for each of her 296 murdered townspeople. (With so many children among them, this has a particularly powerful resonance in the summer of 2022.) Part of a sentence describing Gittl's life in the "beforemayseh" gives a sense of Rothman-Zecher's invented language: "Hendl was halfawakebecome with Gittl's upsitting, what served her almost right for the way she had murmured in her sleep nearly the whole night, as in almost every and each night, spooling and unspooling phantasmagoric psalms as the moon glimpted over the dustvillage, trying vainishly to plug its earholes, yoh, but it could not for it was as though the moon's hands, wrought from stretches of nightsky, were tightfastened under a blanket of darkness, its starsiblings murmursome and blithely snorish all around it, no bowing or prostrating soever, and this is a good kind of badfeeling, how it is to be pinned by one's siblings' snortbreathing and sleepspeaking...."
Those who have the patience and receptivity required will be impressed and moved by this one-of-a-kind creation.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-23166-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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